Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 1819

OpenAI isn’t ruling out that its forthcoming Sora video generator might create nudity — and that could be bad news for the company.

In a sweeping interview with the Wall Street Journal about the forthcoming tool, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati suggested that the company hasn’t yet figured out the whole nudity thing.

“I’m not sure,” Murati told the WSJ’s reporters when asked about nudity. “You can imagine that there are creative settings in which artists might want to have more control over that. Right now we are working with artists, creators from different fields to figure out what’s useful, what level of flexibility the tool [should] provide.”

Read more | >

Facebook is quickly being overrun by dubious, AI-generated junk — which is somehow attracting huge amounts of attention from its aging user base.

Worse yet, according to a new analysis by Stanford and Georgetown University researchers, first spotted by 404 Media, scammers and spammers are using this lowbrow content to grow their audiences on Facebook.

Even with the proliferation of AI image generators, the novelty has clearly yet to wear off for users on the largest social media network, a veritable social media dinosaur.

Read more | >

At first glance, Rabih O. Al-Kaysi’s molecular motors look like the microscopic worms you’d see in a drop of pond water. But these wriggling ribbons are not alive; they’re devices made from crystallized molecules that perform coordinated movements when exposed to light. With continued development, Al-Kaysi and colleagues say, their tiny machines could be used by physicians as drug-delivery robots or engineered into arrays that direct the flow of water around submarines.

Read more | >

Hung-Wei Tseng, a UC Riverside associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has laid out a paradigm shift in computer architecture to do just that in a recent paper titled, “Simultaneous and Heterogeneous Multithreading.”

Tseng explained that today’s computer devices increasingly have graphics processing units (GPUs), hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), or digital signal processing units as essential components. These components process information separately, moving information from one processing unit to the next, which in effect creates a bottleneck.

In their paper, Tseng and UCR computer science graduate student Kuan-Chieh Hsu introduce what they call “simultaneous and heterogeneous multithreading” or SHMT. They describe their development of a proposed SHMT framework on an embedded system platform that simultaneously uses a multi-core ARM processor, an NVIDIA GPU, and a Tensor Processing Unit hardware accelerator.

Read more | >

Incorporating a phase-change material into concrete, researchers have created a self-heating material that can melt snow and ice for up to 10 hours without using salt or shovels. The novel material could reduce the need for plowing and salting and help preserve the integrity of road surfaces.

According to the US Department of Transportation (DOT), more than 70% of roads are in snowy regions. Snow and ice accumulation reduces road friction and vehicle maneuverability, causing drivers to slow and increasing the risk of crashes. Snow-obstructed lanes and roads also reduce roadway capacity and increase travel time.

The DOT states that local and state agencies spend more than US$2.3 billion annually on snow and ice control operations, in addition to the millions spent repairing infrastructure damage caused by snow and ice. Salting is often used before a snow event to prevent icing, but the highly concentrated salt solution can deteriorate concrete or asphalt. In addition, when water seeps into the road and freezes, it expands, causing internal pressure and damaging the road.

Read more | >